About the book: For Nathan Hoks, a poem is a verbal nest, a weave of various scraps and strands inside of which something incubates. In Nests In Air, he makes this definition manifest by blending research of animals’ nest making habits with poetic forms that create vivid imaginative spaces. Structured sets of four poems followed by suites of four images, the poems and images weave together, creating a nest of sorts. These poems are personal and political, social, and ecological, marked by conflict, contradiction, and uncertainty. Open the book and enter a space where “the slippery outline that haunts the soap / And the twisty timeline ghost-riding through me.”
About the author: Nathan Hoks is the author of three books of poems, Reveilles, The Narrow Circle, and Nests in Air. He has also published several chapbooks, including a translation of Vicente Huidobro’s Arctic Poems and Moony Days of Being, which won the 2017 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. He teaches in the Program in Creative Writing at the University of Chicago, and in the MFA Writing Program at the School of the Art Institute.
About the interlocutor: Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. She is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she is affiliated with the Creative Writing Program and Translation Studies. Her most recent poetry collection Elevated Threat Level was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She is the translator of Raymond Queneau's Hitting the Streets, winner of the 2014 Scott Moncrieff Prize for Translation, and co-translator of Decals by Oliverio Girondo, finalist for the 2019 National Translation Award. Her current translation project is supported by a 2021-2022 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Galvin's work appears in publications including Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Poetry. She is the author of a scholarly monograph, News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936-1945, and co-editor of the essay collection Auden at Work.
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